In this month’s edition of the Hamilton Post, we caught up with some of the people who have graced our pages in the last 10 years. It is these people—the members of the community—who bring our paper to life each month, sharing their journeys with us. We couldn’t have a Hamilton Post without them.
But, as I paged through 120 issues of the Post in preparation for this month’s edition, something else struck me. There were a lot of bylines from people who haven’t contributed to the paper for years. They, too, are a part of the Hamilton Post’s story. What happened to them since they last wrote for this publication?
There are far too many names to list all of them, so what follows is just a small selection. Those who appear are included, for the most part, because they were on Facebook Messenger when I started to write this piece. (This is journalism’s dirty little secret—80 percent of reporting now is done on Facebook, with emoji.)
And, now, without further ado, “Where are they now: Hamilton Post edition.”
Shawna Wagner started at the Hamilton Post in September 2005, right at the paper’s start. She remained with the Post until August 2006, at which point she moved to the United Kingdom. She landed a job at Centaur Media, a business-to-business magazine and digital publishing group in London, and stayed for four years. Wagner then went to work as Bloomberg’s Clean Energy and Carbon editor. She’s still in London, working as Bloomberg’s Sustainable Finance editor. She goes by Siobhan Wager now.
Diana Pichardo started at the Hamilton Post as an editorial assistant in October 2006, four months after graduating from Rutgers University with bachelor’s degrees in journalism and psychology. She was promoted to reporter and then assistant editor of the Post. She left the Post in August 2009 to go back to Rutgers and pursue a music degree, but left school to take a job as an assistant editor of a pain management magazine. There, she discovered a passion for medicine.
Pichardo graduated from Rutgers University College of Nursing in 2014 with a bachelor’s in nursing. She currently works on the telemetry floor at Raritan Bay Medical Center in Old Bridge full-time, and would ultimately like to be a nurse practitioner in adult health and a freelance writer.
Myles Ma first worked at the Hamilton Post as an intern in fall 2008, while attending The College of New Jersey. He freelanced for the paper until his graduation in May 2009, then came on full-time in July 2009. Ma stayed at the Post until July 2010. He left to take a job with Patch.com in his native Bergen County. He’s now a reporter for NJ.com, covering Bergen and Passaic counties.
Jamie Kapili, a Steinert alumna, served as an intern for the Hamilton Post in summer 2009, after her freshman year at Syracuse University. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from Syracuse’s Newhouse School in 2012. During her college years, she interned at Silver Screen Pictures on the Lifetime TV movie, “William and Kate,” as well as in the motion picture literature department at The Gersh Agency in Los Angeles. During her senior year, she remotely read feature scripts and wrote coverage for Goldcrest Films, a company based in New York. After graduating, she had a summer internship at Dan Wigutow Productions in New York before moving to Los Angeles in August 2012.
She started working for an executive agent in the physical production department at Paradigm, which represents TV cinematographers, line producers, costume designers, editors and production designers. Kapili left in December 2013 to join Blumhouse Productions, run by producer Jason Blum, who has films like Paranormal Activity, Insidious, Sinister, The Purge and Whiplash to his credit. Kapili worked on Ouija, Purge 2, The Boy Next Door, Insidious: Chapter 3 and Jem and the Holograms, which comes out in October. In November 2014, she left Blumhouse to join Illumination Entertainment, famous for the Despicable Me movies. She works in development and is “always on the hunt for fresh voices, new writers, and cool, whacky stories to tell.” Illumination just released Minions. It’s next movie, The Secret Life of Pets, comes out next summer.
Hamilton High West alumna Allie Ward interned at the Hamilton Post from May 2010 to August 2011. After graduating from Rider University in 2011, Ward went to New York University for a master’s degree in magazine journalism. She interned at Good Housekeeping and NBC while at NYU. In January 2013, she started at Newsmax, a political media company located in New York City. She works as a digital news producer, managing a team of freelance and staff writers to create content for TheWire, a section of Newsmax devoted to trending news.
Rob Anthes, a 2003 Steinert High School graudate, got his job at the Hamilton Post mainly because he was a Steinert High School graduate. He interned for the Hamilton Post’s parent company in summer 2004 in an office above a flower shop on Warren Street in Trenton, a year before the Hamilton Post existed. As a student at Syracuse University, he interned for the sports sections at The Washington Times and the Syracuse Post-Standard. He covered the 2005-06 Syracuse University men’s basketball team for The Daily Orange, during which time he successfully ticked off SU legends Jim Boeheim and Gerry McNamara and spent three days by himself in Jacksonville, Florida, choking on fumes from the nearby Maxwell House coffee factory. Upon graduation in 2007, he started full-time at the Post, first serving as sports reporter. He has changed titles three times and desks once since then, but things are pretty much the same otherwise. He’s still at the Hamilton Post, and still annoying people for fun.
